What has Cami Téllez been working on?
The co-founder of Parade underwear is revitalizing hosiery.
Good morning everyone.
Last night, I spoke to my friend Cami Téllez about a business she’s been working on for about a year. In 2019, Cami started Parade underwear from her dorm — within years the brand was a $200mm business, with viral social media campaigns (creative genius Zoe Cohen was leading brand marketing as their first employee) that became the blueprint for anyone building a business on social media. I remember when I worked at Meta, we even used Parade as a case study on how to use your iPhone to shoot engaging ads.
Today, American hosiery brand L’eggs announced the brand's acquisition from HanesBrands by Windsong Global. Along with that announcement, Cami was appointed as the brand’s Executive Creative Director and Board Advisor. Even if you don’t think you’re familiar with L’eggs, most American women have reached for them in the drugstore without clocking the brand — they’re everywhere. Lane Florsheim reported this morning for WSJ that the market for legwear is growing, “especially among young women, after a period of flat sales. Once worn for modesty, they’ve become more of a statement item: Models, musicians and Hollywood starlets have made tights-as-pants a kind of fashion statement, and the trend is catching on.”
In the below interview, I spoke to Cami about what she believes a creative director’s job is, the brands that are inspiring her (Courrèges, obviously), and the next business she’s building. Iconic word count: eight.
What was it like working on a legacy brand like L’eggs. vs. building a world from scratch like you did with Parade?
In the U.S., we don’t have as many long-standing legacy brands as Europe does, but L’eggs is a rare exception–we’re celebrating our 55th birthday this year. Few brands ever end up chronicled in books about brands, mythologized in design classrooms, or have their packaging featured in the MoMA–but L’eggs is a true piece of the American cultural memory.
You look at Vacation Sunscreen (which I love) and many of these other companies that are paging the 70's and 80’s as a way to signal timelessness and permanence–and I keep telling the team: “This is our actual history!”
The thrilling part about peeling back the archive was to discover that L’eggs was the first brand to build cultural scripts and an aesthetic code for women as they first joined the workplace (which wasn’t that long ago!). There is a deep arsenal of incredible ads that display women as we envision them today—empowered, dynamic, expressive, free–on motorcycles or in the office for the first time.
We’re also lucky to have one of the most iconic logos of the 20th century–a sculptural masterpiece designed by Roger Ferriter and Herb Lubalin at an agency that also worked on Pepsi + CBS logo at the same time. It’s the type of logo that could never be created in the age of Figma and Adobe–it was hand cut via razor blade and has incredible customization–each letter is a story.